It all began on Sunday night when a woman named Kelly Conner went to a local swimming area called Cold Hole in Theodore with her five children, her nephew and several of her nephew’s friends. While there, Conner and another female got into an argument which resulted in the woman striking Conner in the face. Conner hit her back and the fight soon involved several others at the swimming hole.

But when Conner entered her residence, she saw two men from Cold Hole pull up in a white Chevy Tahoe. Realizing she’d been followed, Conner called to her father, 54-year-old Ronald L. Vaughan, for help.

Vaughan grabbed his shotgun and went out to confront the two men as they got out of the vehicle and walked onto the front yard. He fired a warning shot, but both men attacked him and tried to take his shotgun away.

“When I turned my back to go into the house, they jumped me from behind. One of them grabbed the barrel and one grabbed the handle,” Vaughan later told reporters. “One of them gave up and the other one was right there. Me and him were fighting. He was pulling the gun back and forth and it went off,” Vaughan said.

21-year-old Jeffrey Shawn Sanford was shot in the neck and pronounced dead at the scene. His accomplice, Alex Bodiford, 22, was uninjured.

Police arrived at the scene and took both Vaughan and Bodiford into custody. Bodiford admitted to police that he and Sanford had followed Conner back to the home in order to continue the swimming hole altercation, which Bodiford says got started over a wallet being stolen.

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